Seeking to support local businesses, Mountain View officials hit Facebook with a ban on a classic Silicon Valley techie perk: free meals.

That’s according to a new report on a little-discussed provision of Facebook’s 2014 agreement with the city of Mountain View over offices it will occupy in the Village complex at San Antonio Center.

City officials mandated that companies located in the development can’t regularly subsidize employee meals by more than 50 percent, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

“It came in response to local restaurants that said Google, the city’s biggest employer, was hurting their businesses by providing free meals, according to John McAlister, a Mountain View councilman,” according to the Chronicle.

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Facebook, which plans to open the Mountain View offices in the fall, can pay full meal costs for employees at restaurants open to the public, the Chronicle reported. The social media giant is, for now, the sole tenant in the complex.

Facebook can fully subsidize employees if they go to restaurants that are open to the public. City officials wanted to ensure the development “didn’t have 400,000 square feet of office space with people that never left the building,” Michael Kasperzak, a former Mountain View mayor who worked on the legislation, told the Chronicle.

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Google pioneered the free-food benefit, and other companies followed suit. The companies’ offerings hurt a lot of small, independent restaurants, said Steve Rasmussen, owner of the Milk Pail Market, a produce market near Facebook’s future offices.

Google is building a massive new campus in the North Bayshore area of Mountain View, and plans another giant facility in San Jose, where the issue of free food’s effects on local businesses has already come up.

Ethan Baron is a business reporter at The Mercury News, and a native of Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. Baron has worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and photographer in newspapers and magazines for 25 years, covering business, politics, social issues, crime, the environment, outdoor sports, war and humanitarian crises.

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